KINGWOOD — It’s surreal, Amanda Pitzer tweeted, after learning she is one of five people named a 2020 River Hero.
You earned it, said those who nominated her.
Pitzer and the others will be honored at River Rally 2020 by the River Network.
According to its website, “River Network created the River Heroes Award in 2001 to recognize and celebrate individuals whose efforts to protect and restore their local rivers and waters have been extraordinary in scope, scale, impact and heart.”
River Heroes are nominated and selected by their peers.
The nomination for Pitzer said her “tireless and unwavering commitment to the Cheat River and its communities is an inspiration to her staff, colleagues and local sister nonprofit agencies. She is the Cheat River’s champion and primary defender, never compromising her integrity in the fight for improved water quality for the Cheat and clean water for all.”
Always near the water
Pitzer grew up in Erie, Pa., in a neighborhood backed by a small stream. Days found kids riding their bikes or looking for crawdads in the stream.
The family had a pool and she took swimming lessons at the YWCA. Her father loved the river and had a friend who captained a tugboat.
“So if I wasn’t in the creek, he would drag me down to the docks, and I’d be hanging out with the tugboats,” Pitzer recalled. “I was just always around water. I guess I was just really fortunate to have all the access to water.”
Allegheny College recruited students from high schools throughout the Allegheny River watershed, including hers, to do water tests and scan for macroinvertebrates. After high school she attended Allegheny College and was a student leader with the same program.
The program continues to this day and impacted the careers of several students she graduated with, Pitzer said.
Her college degree is in drawing and painting, “So I flip-flopped. I was biology, thinking I was going to be a doctor … but I really was drawn to more of the creative problem solving work that the arts offered me.”
It’s similar to what will be done with environmental art on Preston’s trail.
After graduation she was initially devastated at not being accepted into the master’s art program. Then her father died.
She ended up teaching at a boarding school in southwest Virginia, called Oak Hill Academy.
Finding the Cheat
For a year she would drive five hours to visit her now former husband in Bruceton Mills.
“During that drive for the whole year I saw Preston County in all seasons. I got to come to my first Cheat Fest,” and fell in love with the people and the county. So Pitzer moved to Preston County and did substitute teaching.
One of those teaching stints was at Rowlesburg School, where she learned firsthand that Prestonians didn’t see the Cheat River as favorably as she did.
“Learning more about the history of the area and the flood, it just made sense,” she said. “All these access issues and the fear of the Cheat being dangerous.”
Later she was given a copy of the first pollution survey of the river, done in 1929 after a chemical spill at the tannery at Parsons. Before then, people not only drank from the Cheat, they relied on the fish.
“It was kind of the beginning of some of these industrial accidents that maybe for a time that things were bad, but it kind of created this stigma. That the Cheat is dirty, the Cheat is dangerous. But what feels really good is that is changing because of the hard work of Friends of the Cheat for 25 years,” Pitzer said.
She started 10 years ago with FOC. And more than the Cheat has changed, she believes. Politicians, for example, do more than show up for photo ops now.
Applying for the job was intimidating, she said. Only 29, she knew older men were also finalists, and she knew filling the shoes of former FOC Director Keith Pitzer, her late father-in-law, would be tough.
She had worked for Friends of Deckers Creek but didn’t have a lot of experience managing people.
When she got the job, she threw herself into it and used the literal friends of the Cheat who helped her learn everything from finances to grant writing.
In the last 10 years, she estimates FOC has gotten about $7 million in grants to clean up acid mine drainage and now move to the next step of promoting tourism.
In the next five to 10 years, she sees FOC reaching out to the Cheat Lake community and Pittsburgh foundations for financial help, “because that’s where all our water goes.”
“I think we’re in a really good place now, and I have a great staff here,” Pitzer said. “It’s relationships that Keith started and relationships I’ve maintained and gosh, that’s a lot of this job.”
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